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The Interview: Debbie Harry on sex, exhibitionism and searching for her birth mother

“I took down all of my mirrors. The world made such a big deal of the way I looked.” Interview by Eve Barlow

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEY L

The Sunday Times, April 23 2017, 12:01am

Debbie Harry walks into a private members’ club in Chelsea, New York, looking like a ninja. She’s covered up in black, a hood tightly wound around her head, with sunglasses as wide as her heart-shaped face. She removes the hood, the glasses, the coat, and — voilà! — there she is, the owner of the most iconic mug since Marilyn Monroe. A copy of The New Yorker pokes out of her handbag. For the front woman of Blondie, Manhattan’s punk-art-fashion stars, that’s as close to proof of identity as a birth certificate.

Harry, 71, has lived on the island since the mid-1960s: at 20, she fled the New Jersey suburbs to lose herself in the metropolis. She worked as a Playboy Bunny, waitressed at dive…